Golf club bags are of course open ended and thus the open end must be closed when precipitation occurs if the clubs and the inside of the bag are to be protected. Bag manufacturer provide a hood for such use, but most golfers simply stuff that hood into the bag when the weather is fair; thus, the hood is difficult to retrieve when needed.
Golf club bags do not come equipped with towels, however. On any golf course at any time, nearly every golf bag on the course will have a towel attached thereto by some means rigged up by the golfer because towels are very handy on a golf course, especially if the course is wet.
Accordingly, inventors have developed accessory items in the form of combination hoods and towels. For example, a reversible hood is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,498,579 to Brick. A first side of the hood is formed of a water repellant material and a second side thereof is formed of a towel-like material. The device, when not in use as a hood, is releasably attachable to the golf club bag in its reversed configuration, i.e., with its towel side out. When in use as a hood, the water-repellant side is out and the towel side becomes inaccessible. Thus, the Brick device is usable as a hood or as a towel, but it cannot be used as a towel when it is being used as a hood, i.e., the conversion into a hood deletes the towel function. Since a towel is most needed during light drizzles, the loss of the towel function during such times is a significant limitation of the Brick device.
Thus, there is a need for a combination hood and towel that retains its towel function when in its hood configuration, but the prior art, considered as a whole, neither teaches nor suggests to those of ordinary skill in this art how such a desirable combination device could be provided, as evidenced by the collective failure of earlier workers in this field to produce the novel construction disclosed hereinafter.